It was 1964. Lee Fisher, a young black man from Williamsport, Pennsylvania, arrived in the small farming community of Davenport to teach elementary school and coach basketball. It wasn’t long before a fifth-grade girl told him that she never before had a black teacher and that she was afraid. Fisher told her that he understood and he arranged for her to transfer to another class with the understanding that she would always be welcome to return.
Having recently graduated from Purdue University where he studied physical education and political science, Fisher was contacted by a friend attending college in Oneonta. There was a job posting for a teacher in Davenport. Fisher turned to his dad and said, “It doesn’t matter where. I just want to teach and coach.” Teach and coach he did. In addition to teaching elementary school and junior high school, Fisher coached local basketball for 46 years and taught driver’s education for 57 years.
When young, I admired my friends who could play basketball. It seemed to require creative body movements, much like dancing, which felt foreign to me. Fisher told me that his first love was football — not basketball — but coaching, for him, was not as much about the sport as it was about growth. He described his joy in “seeing a kid work on their weakness and grow; seeing a quiet student connecting with his team, call his name out, and holler for the ball.” Kids would contact him years later to tell him their success in life “was all through basketball.” When I asked about his win/loss record, he told me he didn’t know. “I have had some successful teams but the record is not what’s important,” he said. Shortly before we met for tea and muffins at Capresso’s, he had received a call from a former student, asking him to please attend his upcoming 50th class reunion. Fisher looked at me and said, “That’s what is important.”
Fisher seems to be just as passionate about teaching driver’s ed as he is about coaching basketball. After all, he explained, “You learn when to pass in both. You learn when to stay in your lane and you get penalized for physical contact in both.” He told me of a woman who recently stopped him in a parking lot. “Mr. Fisher?” she asked. “I think she was surprised that I was still alive. She told me how I had taught her to drive when her husband could no longer take her everywhere she needed to go and how learning to drive changed her life.”
More recently, Fisher has made a name for himself as the president of the Oneonta Chapter of the NAACP. He recalled how the community reaction to the police abuse of the SUNY Oneonta “Black List” gave birth to the local NAACP chapter. A group of about 80 concerned citizens were meeting at St. James Church. Police had removed black students from the showers and forced them off buses because an elderly white woman had claimed to have been attacked by a young black male. “It was Regina Betts who said that we need to be more than a group of concerned citizens. We need to join an organization that has a little more clout. Everybody has to have human rights. If things happen, it’s good to have an organization that people can come to for help,” he said. Fisher was no stranger to the NAACP as his father — a custodian who for 40 years cleaned the bunkhouses in which train engineers would sleep — had a long affiliation with the NAACP in Williamsport.
Despite all the work that has been done, Fisher worries about the future. “Older people are forced to stand in line for two hours to vote,” he said. “Teachers are losing their jobs if they talk about racism.” While a strong supporter of athletes, Fisher asks why an athlete signing an $80 million contract should not pay his fair share in taxes. He lights up when he talks about his 8-month-old grandson, but worries that he will have to fight these same battles.
Does he feel that his work teaching, coaching and leading the NAACP have made a difference? “I would hope that it was not through basketball or the NAACP that I made a difference. I hope that by just being myself, I had some influence in making race relations better,” he said.
As for the young girl who told him she was afraid to have a black teacher all those years ago? She returned to his class in sixth grade and then met him at her 34th class reunion. There, she told Fisher, “The only reason I came to this reunion is because I heard you would be here.”
There can be no doubt that Lee Fisher has made a real difference — just by being himself.